In my cubicle at the firm, I kept hidden a thesaurus, although the endless financial documents on which I worked resisted any linguistic zest, and novels that I read in ten-minute increments when I hid in the emergency stairwell and told myself I was only taking a break.
So being ordered in the dead of night by a girl with great breasts to read a story called “An Outlaw Life” did not frighten me. It was the author’s name, Joan Ashby, that turned my skin cold, set my heart racing, returned to me the loss of all my childhood dreams.
When I shook my head, Christina said, “What, Daniel?” and then I shook the book, as if eager to comply with her request. She rolled onto her back, a naked carnal display, but I could see nothing, could only feel the old hurts, the old fear coming in waves that intensified, a fear I first recognized at eleven, that Ashby’s work contained hidden dangers that would trip me up, plummet me down into some scary, inhospitable landscape, the ground pockmarked and sodden. When I was still a kid, the name Ashby would sometimes punch itself unbidden into my brain, and all I could imagine was quicksand, myself being sucked under.
The paperback anthology in my hand turned into a hundred-pound weight, the paragraphs hurtling off the page and smacking me in the face, and I suddenly understood that time had not done its work.
My childhood fragility, the striated pain of that earlier time, which I thought long bulwarked by years of reason and rationality and maturity, had not made me impenetrable and impervious. I instantly felt my thin skin, my hatred about not measuring up, my despair that I could not match her abilities, my sheer ordinariness, everything I felt when I read that other story of hers a decade before.
I realized then that the tumultuous things that happen in childhood are tsunamic experiences that weaken our fleshy armor, leave deep cracks and crevices in their wake, and even when the scars are knitted together, even when there is a tough keloided ridge on top, it takes little effort to rip them wide open, where the pus still pools a hundredth of a millimeter below.
With Christina stroking my leg, urging me to get started, I could not avoid the story, could not avoid what I had always fought against: that Joan Ashby was, is, and will always be my mother, and that she caused me to abandon my dreams.
I focused on the first word and prayed that my courageousness would be rewarded. When I reached the end of the story, there was no reward. Just Ashby, always Ashby, blowing another hole through my impoverished heart.
Reading “An Outlaw Life” that night is marked on my personal time line with a blood-red circle. It marked another massive splintering in my life, but this time I was all grown up, and I could throw those shards skyward, determine what I wanted to do amidst all of the breakage. This is the story that made me rethink everything.
Peck Traynor looked forward to Wednesday nights when she called her sister Margo, telephonically breaching the gulf between New York City and Devils Creek, a little town with innocent fields and crops. Eleven digits, twelve hundred miles of highways, and one swift-moving river separated Peck from her family. Her parents, and her brother, TJ, and Margo and her husband and their children, Bug and Bea, one six, the other four, properly named Beau and Margaret, all lived just miles apart on the vast fertile Traynor land that spread north from the town.
Fifteen years ago, newly quit of Devils Creek, where she was called Thessaly, Peck stood in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan where an old man with tumbled white hair and a gavel said from on high, “Are you sure?” She nodded. She wanted to carry forward some bond to her beginning and when she looked up at the judge, named Sykes, she said, “Yes, I’m taking my father’s middle name as my new first name.” The proceedings were intricate, but when she walked out of the courthouse legally renamed, she had forgiven her younger self for the wrong turns she had taken. Had she not veered off course, she would not have found her words, uncovered her voice, flown away to an island in the middle of everything where she could become someone else.
Since then, every Wednesday night, Peck called Margo to hear about the family’s week in Devils Creek. When Margo’s voice ran down, Peck took over and wondered what Devils Creek residents would make of her tales about the soft-handed college students who signed up for her fall, winter, and spring semester creative writing classes at NYU; classes that inevitably cratered midway because her students, just a decade or so younger than she, misperceived the weight of their worlds, found meaningful that which was not. Unlike her students, the Devils Creek residents were smart and thorny and willfully dedicated, but their world was almanacs, rainfall predictions, growth rates, and Deere equipment, and the concept that one of their own might be a professor and, more important, a highly regarded, semi-famous writer would not compute.